Grantcoulson's Blog

     “We all in the same boat brother. You rock it too far to the right you fall in the waddah, rock it too far to the left you fall in the same waddah, and ‘s just as wet on both sides.” Huddie Ledbetter, folk singer.

    There is a conference in Canada about “rebuilding” Haiti. This is a great opportunity to spend my money doing things which won’t work. Among the early ones is “wind generation”, an idea which isn’t really good for anyone, even destroyed countries. The social engineers are salivating at the idea of economy restructuring and nation building where they can apply their pet theories and other people’s money. Watch the enterprise  fail in a welter of corruption and accusations.

    Watching politicians legislate is like driving behind a car with “I brake for illusions.” or “I brake for delusions.” Politicians should come with a label “I legislate for delusions.” In order to do this one must be ignorant of history and easily swayed by current consensus. For example, the current “warming trend” must be regarded as unique. Then, blame must be attached to negatives such as greed or conspicuous consumption such as driving expensive vehicles. Once the terror and perpetrators are identified, everything is possible. A socialist will allow you complete freedom so long as everything not banned is compulsory.

from the book: Shadow Dancing

on the Grave of Hope:

    Continued outline for real programs.

1. Use of Positive Reinforcement

    Motivating and supporting the many hours of participation required by a successful program compels  the astute use of many sources of positive reinforcement. Clients need to be told they are doing well, only when they are doing well, of course, and see that they are doing well in all the components of a program.

    2. Time efficient (Dense)

    Efficiency, in this sense, refers to the amount of behavior change per unit time. This means that exercises are presented as quickly as possible and the circumstances are set up so that clients respond quickly. Something useful should always be happening.

    3. Scripted

    A scripted program describes in great detail what the program provider should be doing and what the client should be learning. Scripting ensures that essential elements are covered in the correct order. A scripted manual guarantees that all providers present the program as designed and don’t leave out the requisite positive reinforcers.

    One curious objection to the use of scripting is that it limits “spontaneity” and “creativity”, exactly the kinds of activity which must be limited in program providers. A surgeon’s pirouette during an operation might show delightful spontaneity and creativity, but is not recommended for patient well-being. Irrelevant behavior is distracting and time-wasting.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies   

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

    In summary, a psychologist, or anyone in the social services, must avoid the siren songs of employers, laymen, other psychologists and the media. These sources will always lead astray and ensure that programs are polgrams, trendy and useless.

Characteristics of a Successful Program

Points for something which works:

2). Failure results in program revision, not client excoriation.

3). The program is evaluated constantly, not after several years.

4). The program is tested constantly, the clients are tested once.

5). The program is scrapped if it doesn’t produce results based on the DIW criteria.

    Sports commentators are always reminding us that successful athletes and teams “do the little things right.” The things are little only because they make up a small part of the whole. Without all of the “little things”, nothing exists.

    We have seen that the misapplication of social sciences can produce "positive harm", an oxymoron, such as the case of false accusations based on repressed memories and non-occurring sexual abuse. The only positive aspect is in the intention  of the program. An ounce of result is worth the world’s weight in intention. Proper application also produces non-results when programs are ineffective.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

What’s a Psychologist to do: Avoiding Insidious Influences

    An insidious influence is any reinforcer source which  turns one in the direction of doing things which are useless or harmful or doesn’t turn one in the direction of doing things which are useful. One source is the people who pay the wages of a psychologist. I call this, "Hiring an expert and then telling how to do their jobs." When working for a government agency, I was asked many times to do psychodynamic, one-to-one counselling, presumably because the talk shows, soap operas and movies-of-the-week told laymen that this was what needed doing.

    Another deadly influence is laymen who are very willing to listen to you tell them what they think they know. The media are especially dangerous because they will provide a voice to anyone who has something dramatic and heart-rending to report or lie about. In education, rapt attention will be paid if you talk about student deficiencies such as victimhood from social injustice, dyslexia, dyscalculia, broken homes, lack of discipline, the latest funding cut and etc; everything, in sum, except how to teach students better. In correctional rehabilitation, people like to hear about the importance of abuse, the breakdown of society, poverty and discrimination as the basis of criminal behavior. They also listen if you talk about how terrible criminals are and how depth psychotherapy fixes them because it gets to the "real" reasons. In short, you must entertain and/or blame. Start to talk about effective rehabilitation and audience eyes begin to glaze. They will listen to certain things, dispute others and get genuinely nasty about others. Laymen must be ignored. One of the most difficult things about being a psychologist is that everybody is one.        

    No one who has read this far will be surprised that other psychologists are a particularly malignant source of misdirection, because the majority of psychologists do not have to produce results. Most of the misguided have never been influenced by any DIW aggravations. Psychology conferences are famous for the tedium of their secret language and statistics, but they really are places where people get together and talk at great length and detail about very little. If a particular personality test is popular, there will be many workshops on it but little or nothing on how to change people’s behavior. If something makes the movie-of-the-week, be assured that it will make the psychology-meeting-of-the year. Repressed memories, abuse and multiple personalities have all run their nonsensical course. When someone asks me, after I’ve attended one of these presentations, purely for comedic value, what I thought about it, I reply, "Who cares how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, what’s really important is how many can dance on the point." This usually sends them mumbling away, leaving me in enchanted peace. If you care, four angels can dance on the point of a pin. It has to do with the magical number related to the ethnically  sensitive four directions in the full circle of Life (just kidding). I personally do not attend gatherings of psychologists lest I become infected by “consensus disease”. Consensus disease occurs when one believes he knows and can do something important because he agrees with the majority.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

     About the icon, Che Guevera. What Fontova doesn’t mention is the execution by sledgehammer or starving to death in a locked cell. “Of course we execute.” There is no end to cruelty justified by “knowing” you’re right on the way to Nirvana.

      “According to the “Black Book of Communism,” those firing-squad executions had reached 14,000 by the end of the ’60s, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of more than 3 million executions in the U.S. “I don’t need proof to execute a man,” snapped Che to a judicial toady in 1959. “I only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him! … Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute from revolutionary conviction.”

       Upon arriving in Havana in January 1959 after an utterly bogus guerrilla war (The New York Times breathlessly reported of “thousands dead in single battles!” The official tally compiled by the U.S. embassy after two years of ferocious “civil war” was 184 dead on both sides, half New Orleans’ annual murder tally.), Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana’s old Spanish fortress La Cabana as a handy-dandy, ready-made execution pit. So he promptly put his firing squads to work in triple shifts.

     Edwin Tetlow, Havana correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, reported on a mass “trial” orchestrated by Che Guevara in February 1959, where Tetlow noticed the death sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.” Humberto Fontova.

    “Ontario’s Green Energy Act, said the Premier, is the “best of its kind, best in class, in North America.” By that he means, it offers the biggest giveaways, the fattest subsidies and the most generous guarantees. To hell with good economics, open markets and competition. Using dictatorship-style powers, the McGuinty government can order its subsidiary agencies — power authorities, distribution companies and regulators — to set rates and build power lines. All the Samsungs of the world have to do is show up and receive Ontario’s Feed-in Tariffs — guaranteed above-market power rates of 13.5¢ a kilowatt hour for wind and 44.3¢ for solar power.” Terence Corcoran–National Post–January 22. 2010. As Ontario tries to outdo California to be the trendiest–that is, the most mistaken jurisdiction in the world. Being world-class is nice, but leading in stupidity is not a proud boast.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

      There are  no organized constituencies demanding change in the social sciences, but there are large, powerful and well organized constituencies such as unions and professional organizations lobbying vigorously, and viciously, for the status quo and more "professional" control. These organized constituencies must concentrate on the producer and not the consumer. This keeps ineffectiveness alive and stifles innovation. When an industry or a union  is protected against competition, the rest of us are protected against efficiency and improvement.

    There are very negative effects of implementing nonsense. This has been shown with Whole Language, repressed memory and facilitated communication, multiple personalities, talking "depth" therapies, manipulatives and "whole mathematics" teaching, invented spelling and various kinds of ineffective programming in all areas. The negative effects fall on the clients while practitioners get status and money. No teacher, principal or educational administrator has ever lost a penny of pay for failure to teach any of the thousands of students I have seen in 37 years. The public education system is no more capable of producing effective education than the Soviet economy was of making reliable cars or useful toilet paper.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

     “Sometimes it doesn’t matter that you have a better product, if your competitors have better salesmen.” Thomas Sowell.  All Intend no Does.

    Obama’s “stimulus” package has produced “national” jobs, but not “local” jobs. Or “The results are poor, but the statistics are favorable.” If you can accept this, you’re a politician with no shame and/or logical sense.

    Today’s quote is from Ogden Lindsley, a psychologist who  recognized the importance of results. If everyone had such assumptions, psychology’s spokesman would not be Dr. Phil. In my humble opinion, this is one of the best passages in psychology.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

      Lindsley outlines how effectiveness can be mandated in a university psychology class where the payoff was grades, not money. "Only 30 percent of my class successfully modified a child’s behavior when I begged them to do it. These are what I call the "stimulus responders." The rest of them only talked good Behavior Modification–they didn’t do any (emphasis added). The glib failures–the "talkers" included my own doctoral candidates; they gave me beautiful excuses in operant terminology…Three or 4 weeks through the Spring semester, it dawned on me that I wasn’t taking my own medicine. I wasn’t using any consequences. My successful students weren’t being treated any differently from the glib failures…from now on, if you fail to improve a child’s behavior beyond the .001 level of confidence, you will receive a grade of ‘incomplete,’ for ‘incomplete modification.’…p. 224. "This procedural change brought about fantastic results: 228 percent successful modification projects because 54 percent of the students turned in more than two projects…With that success, I later increased the requirement to three cases a semester…who knows what the upper limit might be." The largest majority of university courses stress knowing over doing and the two are not highly correlated. Most university courses turn out "glib failures" because the students are not required to succeed in anything except glibly expressing hypothetical knowledge. Of course, this is good training for government service which consists of little but glibly expressing politically-conditioned hypothetical knowledge.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

Lindsley, O. R. (1970). Procedures in common described by a common language. In C. Neuringer & J.L. Michael (eds.) Behavior modification in clinical psychology. New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 221-236.

     Ontario, in spite of record deficits has recently put out money for all-day kindergarten and announced the subsidization of wind farms and electricity-generating solar technologies. The farther north one goes, the less sense solar generation makes and it makes no sense in the best of latitudes. Ontario and California, apparently, never met a trendy idea they didn’t cotton to and find worth of spending money on.

    “Those who support the Ontario government’s new all-day kindergarten plan may be sobered by the US government’s recent evaluation of its Head Start program. Conceived in the mid-sixties as part of the war against poverty, the Head Start program aims to boost the school readiness of low-income children – just as all-day kindergarten is promised to do for Ontario.

    Comparing students who had been randomly assigned to Head Start with students who had not, the researchers found virtually no differences – cognitive, behavioural, or emotional – at the end of grade 1. This despite an enormously expensive program that includes medical, dental, and mental health care; nutrition services; and efforts to work with parents to foster their children’s development.

    Do we really want to spend an extra couple of billion dollars a year on a program that is unlikely to affect student success while simultaneously pushing the province further into the red and enhancing the power of its teachers’ unions?” Malkin Dare.

    All-day kindergarten is very expensive, but at least it doesn’t work.

    Himalayan glaciers are safe. In another IPCC debacle, they will not melt by 2035.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

Effective programs

    This book has established four facts, 1) There are very powerful and well researched programs which work quite well to solve real human problems. These programs represent genuine progress in the social sciences, 2) The most useful programs are those used the least frequently, 3) The most frequently used programs are of little value, 4) The programs of little value almost always take place in situations where government finances the operation, directly or otherwise. This chapter will summarize the reasons for this state of affairs, using effective psychology to explain why polgrams are ineffective. This inevitable impotence lives within all government systems, but this final chapter will formally place ineffectiveness in the context of rewards or, as the economists call them, incentive structures. If the hypothesis is correct, as millennia of observation suggest it is, no progress will be made until the consumer can hire and fire the producer and the producer receives no subsidies or preferential treatment, but only what he earns from unforced interchange with the customer.

    From these four essential  facts come  two main themes. The first is that there is an inventory of extremely successful programs. The second is that successful programs aren’t used because of the wrong incentive structure for those who provide the service. The unavoidable infirmity of government operations is not confined to social sciences programs, but social sciences programs are what this book is about. Most government social services are so ineffective that they are no better than nothing. Only those which “park” people safely, such as education or criminal rehabilitation, can be said to be successful to the minor extent of babysitting.

    Every effective program will have many elements. If any of these components is missing, the program will be less effective. The lack of a few of these factors will render the program useless so that it is easy to run an unsuccessful program which looks like a successful one by failing to implement a few essential parts. This produces the pseudo-program or the Something Like It impostor program. The most important element that the present analysis requires is that payoff be linked to success providing the engine for all effectiveness. Any program without this link will have a low probability of usefulness.

    Any operation can go wrong at many points. The first is in the assumptions of the program itself, reflected in its design, and the second is in the program’s implementation which can fail for many reasons, among which are lack of training, lack of oversight, or lack of a manual to ensure proper implementation.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

     The experts on Climate Change are always telling us about the difference between weather–what we see and, climate–the long terms trends of weather. Translation–weather is what we see and climate is what they use to terrify us with predictions of coming terror.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

WITH CERTAINTY ABOUT EVERYTHING AND FACTS ABOUT NOTHING

    The sovereign [politician] is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient: the duty of superintending the industry of private people." Adam Smith. (The Wealth of Nations, vol. II, bk. IV, ch. 9.)

        Some of the conclusions that the social sciences must reach are, a)There are things beyond the reach of the social sciences, b)most of what is done is myth and nonsense, c) effective programs are rarely used, d) successful programs require a lot of hard work.

    The situation will not change by depending on “…the traditional practice of blaming the actors for the action.” No situation will change until the contingencies change so that failure is punished and success reinforced. This reversal will not and cannot occur in any government agency, embedded as it is among the pernicious influences of politics, unions and tradition of decades of failure having no consequences. Any application of the social sciences under government control is irredeemable in terms of effectiveness.

In Conclusion

    Psychology specifically, and the social sciences in general, can make many things better, but effective programs are seldom used. These programs always represent a trade-off which is usually politically impossible. The Elites, including the media, politicians and union leaders almost always get things wrong and their advice is to be avoided. Their ability to do, or even predict, important things is abysmal because facts have never been influenced by the arrogance that comes with status on the INTEND-IS side.

    There is a strong belief by many people that they are uniquely capable of directing the affairs of others and that the affairs of others are in desperate need of directing.

    The usefulness of government is based on two conceits. The first is that guidance is necessary and the second that this guidance is best provided by those who have no responsibility. In most cases guidance is unnecessary and in no cases is it best provided by those with no responsibility. The Divine Right of Kings meant that the King had a Divine Right to Rule, but to ameliorate this conceit, the King was a conduit of Divine Guidance. The elite believe they have a Divine Right to Rule, but their guidance comes from their own superior intellect and compassion in spite of continual evidence to the contrary.

Now you know.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

                   Media Free Ride for Right (Left) Thinking Liberals

         "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’" Joe Biden to Katie Couric during the presidential campaign of 2008.

    The stock market crash was in 1929, Roosevelt was not president until 1933 and television was still in its infancy in 1929 and there was certainly no nationwide network to go on. In spite of these ridiculous errors, Biden was allowed to get away with this while Sarah Palin was grilled relentlessly on much more arcane matters by the same, “neutral journalist”, Katie Couric. There are hundreds of examples of this. The Elite has (the Elite is a group so the verb for the singular is appropriate) a point of view, “Government must do something.” which goes on in spite of continuous failure.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

Politics

    Politics is an entertaining form of street theater. Politicians scream at each other about things which don’t matter, spend money for programs which don’t work, take credit for things upon which they have no affect and avoid blame for things they did. All the while, they take care of their friends by giving them money and punish the rest of us by taking it away. This profession is a poor guide for choosing what works.

Solution

    There are those in the social sciences who believe that more effort should be put into “selling” good programs. As with the British captains of the convict ships, only an incentive for output will produce better output. These incentives will never occur in a government situation even when they use effective programs. You can teach a monkey to dance, but once you stop throwing peanuts, he’ll go back to stealing bananas.

    The ideal situation is one in which one spends one’s own money to purchase something he will use. This automatically produces an incentive structure for the provider to meet the requirements of the customer and gives the customer control over quality.

    Vouchers would solve many problems in school because, while parents would be spending someone else’s money–the government voucher–they would be purchasing something for themselves. They would be careful what they purchase, and limited in what they could spend.

     What do we know about progress in the social sciences? This book has outlined many programs which produce results far superior to standard polgrams and represent real progress. It is also unarguably true that the most effective programs are used very infrequently. The prime product of any government agency is spin and results in the social sciences are easy to spin. Under ineffective programs, or no programs at all, some children learn, some long-term criminals stop breaking the law, some people stop being depressed and many stop using drugs and alcohol. These “successes” are what government employees point to as evidence of effectiveness.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    This is from one of George Will’s recent columns.

“Kevin Starr, author of an eight-volume — so far — history of the (formerly) Golden State, says California is "on the verge" of becoming something without an American precedent — "a failed state." William Voegeli, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, tartly says that "Rome wasn’t sacked in a day, and California didn’t become Argentina overnight." Indeed.

It took years for liberalism’s redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: "Between 1990 and 2007," Voegeli writes, "some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state." “

   Changing the incentive structure to punish the productive will have no consequences.

“It took years for liberalism’s mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California’s once creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians’ many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism’s laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans.” “

    As people vote for incentives with their feet, or wheels, take your pick of metaphors.

    “It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California’s welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico’s poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a "unionocracy," run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year’s pay for life.”

    This is eerily similar to Ontario–liberal and broke. The only saving grace is that we call our liberals Liberals. It’s true–look it up. That’s about as amazing a coincidence as Lou Gehrig getting Lou Gehrig’s disease.  It’s not that the start of the decline was indiscernible in either jurisdiction. At least we’ll always have General Motors–too big to fail and too incompetent to succeed. We’ll have “this valuable resource” so long as we keep subsidizing it. Only a politician could believe something that needs to be subsidized is “valuable”.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

       This had to happen. At least these books are good for something.

    President Obama is shocked, shocked that incompetence pervades the bureaucratic structures of U.S. security agencies and he is ordering changes. This is a political ploy–Express outrage at areas of your responsibility and then try to look magisterial as you fix something that  should have never been broken. Although as long as terror bombers go flash rather than boom, there’s more startle than terror.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

     Caricaturing most of what passes for social sciences is like fishing in a barrel with a hand grenade. Many of the things in current practice are so grotesque that we will wonder one day how they every could have been taken seriously, let alone done on a large scale. This true for Facilitated Communication, false memories, psychotherapy for alien abductions, Whole Language, in-depth psychotherapy, Interventions and many other data-free movements reviewed in this book.

    "Facts don’t win cases.", is a lawyer’s pragmatic maxim. A jury trial is entertainment and the prosecution and defence are judged on amusement, believability and drama.  Facts should inform and control social science programs, but decisions are usually based on who puts on the best show. Unfortunately,  there are always people who can put on a  show and others who are willing to applaud. If there is no consequence for failure or success, those who control programs will choose programs which are the most entrancing. As the programs I have reviewed show many times, the more powerful the results, the less frequently the technique is used. This is not due to active avoidance of good programs, but to active embrace of useless ones, although effective programs are much more difficult than the ones typically employed and will be avoided by those who have a choice.                                   

    There are very negative effects of implementing nonsense as seen with Whole Language, repressed memory, Facilitated Communication, multiple personalities, talking "depth" therapies, manipulatives and "whole mathematics" teaching, invented spelling and various kinds of ineffective programming in all areas. The negative effects weigh on the clients and those who suffer collateral legal damage while the practitioners get status and money. No teacher, principal or educational administrator has ever lost a penny of pay for failure to teach any of the hundreds of students I have seen in 36 years. The Law of Consequences tells us that the public education system is no more capable of producing effective education than the Soviet economy was of making reliable cars, tractors, computers or toilet paper.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies